total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

Ah-HAH! Yes, I have been saying this for YEARS. Inadequate-to-say-the-least government response to disaster in major city as an inspiration to civil society leading eventually to democratization? Hurricane Katrina = Mexico City quake = Managua quake. Insanely single-minded devotion to the "free" market leading to massive sell-offs of public goods right down to the post office? Chile in the era of the Chicago Boys got there way before the US did. And let's not even mention the destruction of habeus corpus rights and reliance on torture in cases of "national emergency" - Cold-War era Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and those are just the places where states formally acknowedged what they were doing, more or less.

Of course in Latin America they could always blame the gringos. The gringos don't really have that luxury.